A new study in East Asian women has identified three genetic changes linked to an increased risk of breast cancer. The research, led by Vanderbilt University investigators, was published online July 20 in Nature Genetics. While breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies among women worldwide, most studies of the genetic risk factors for the disease have focused on women of European ancestry. Given the differences in genetic heritage and environmental exposures between East Asian women and those of European ancestry, the investigators decided to conduct a study ...

Physicists Sergei Filippov (MIPT and Russian Quantum Center at Skolkovo) and Mario Ziman (Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, and the Institute of Physics in Bratislava, Slovakia) have found a way to preserve quantum entanglement of particles passing through an amplifier and, conversely, when transmitting a signal over long distances. Details are provided in an article published in the journal Physical Review A (see preprint). Quantum entangled particles are considered to be the basis of several promising technologies, including quantum computers and communication ...

FALLS CHURCH, Va. -- U.S. workplaces may need to consider innovative methods to prevent fatigue from developing in employees who are obese. Based on results from a new study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene (JOEH), workers who are obese may have significantly shorter endurance times when performing workplace tasks, compared with their non-obese counterparts. The study, conducted at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., examined the endurance of 32 individuals in four categories (non-obese young, obese young, non-obese older, and obese older) ...

DNA has the nasty habit of getting tangled and forming knots. Scientists study these knots to understand their function and learn how to disentangle them (e.g. useful for gene sequencing techniques). Cristian Micheletti, professor at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste and his team have been carrying out research in which they simulate these knots and their dynamics. In their latest paper, just published in the journal Soft Matter, Micheletti together with Marco Di Stefano, first author and PhD student at SISSA, and colleagues from Ljubljana ...

Streptococcus mutans, one of the principal bacteria that cause dental caries, has increased the change in its genetic material over time, possibly coinciding with dietary change linked to the expansion of humanity. This is highlighted in a study by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Laboratorio Nacional de Genómica para la Biodiversidad (National Laboratory of Genomics for Biodiversity) in Mexico who, for the first time, have sequenced genetic material from this bacterium in populations from the past. Increase in genetic diversity has ...

The panel discussion is getting heated -- but what exactly is in the new proposed law that the experts on TV are arguing about so vigorously? Up until now, spontaneous questions such as these that arise during a program had to be clarified through a viewer's own research on the Internet. If it's up to researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS in Sankt Augustin, Germany, viewers will no longer have to look up such additional information in the future. In the project "LinkedTV", the institute is working with eleven partners ...

This news release is available in German. Animals can use varying sensory modalities for orientation, some of which might be very different from ours. Some bird species for example take the polarization pattern produced by sunlight in the atmosphere to calibrate their orientation systems. Now researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, and Queen's University Belfast have discovered with colleagues from Israel that a night active mammal, the greater mouse-eared bat, has the capability to orient using polarized light. These bats ...

Geographers at the University of Southampton have found a link between increasing average temperatures in India and a reduction in wheat production. Researchers Dr John Duncan, Dr Jadu Dash and Professor Pete Atkinson have shown that recent warmer temperatures in the country's major wheat belt are having a negative effect on crop yield. More specifically, they found a rise in nighttime temperatures is having the most impact. Dr Jadu Dash comments: "Our findings highlight the vulnerability of India's wheat production system to temperature rise, which is predicted to ...

Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), the Vienna University of Technology and the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Lublin have succeeded in embedding nearly perfect semiconductor crystals into a silicon nanowire. With this new method of producing hybrid nanowires, very fast and multi-functional processing units can be accommodated on a single chip in the future. The research results will be published in the journal Nano Research. Nano-optoelectronics are considered the cornerstone of future chip technology, but the research faces major ...

Intestinal parasites such as tapeworms, hookworms and a protist called Blastocystis can be beneficial to human health, according to a new paper that argues we should rethink our views of organisms that live off the human body. To prove the point, paper co-author Julius Lukeš even ingested three developmental stages of a large species of tapeworm called Diphyllobothrium latum. After more than a year with the tapeworms, which might have grown to be as long as four metres each by now, he says he feels fine. "I knew there was no risk," he says. Lukeš, a senior fellow ...

Currently, no cure exists for Alzheimer's disease, the devastating neurological disease affecting more than 5 million Americans. But scientists are now reporting new progress on a set of compounds, initially developed for cancer treatment, that shows promise as a potential oral therapy for Alzheimer's. Their study appears in ACS' Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. Carlo Ballatore, Kurt R. Brunden and colleagues explain that in a healthy brain, the protein known as tau binds to and stabilizes microtubules, which are cellular components made of protein inside cells. Microtubules ...

SAN ANTONIO (July 22, 2014) — Mouse models of human oral cancer treated with an agent called capsazepine showed dramatic tumor shrinkage without damage to surrounding tissues, researchers from the School of Dentistry and School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio found. The Health Science Center has claimed intellectual property on results of the study, which is described in the journal Oral Oncology. Late diagnosis, low survival Oral squamous cell carcinoma is the eighth most common cancer in the U.S. with 40,000 new cases and ...

(MEMPHIS, Tenn. – July 22, 2014) The voice on the recording was low and calm as the speaker recounted the telephone call that brought the news he was infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS: "My heart just stopped for a little bit and next thing you know I was on the floor flat on my face boohooing, crying like a baby." Yet the message was hopeful when the recording ended less than 10 minutes later. "Don't feel like this is the end of you . . . because it is just God setting you up for something greater," the anonymous speaker tells an unseen ...

The new PandaX facility, located deep underground in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, hosts a large liquid-xenon detector designed to search for direct evidence of dark matter interactions with the nuclei of xenon and to observe 136Xe double-beta decay. The detector's central vessel was designed to accommodate a staged target volume increase from an initial 120 kg (stage I) to 0.5 t (stage II) and ultimately to a multi-ton scale. The technical design of the PandaX facility and detector is outlined in a new paper co-authored by Ji Xiangdong, of the Institute ...

Basement membrane degradation and blood-brain barrier damage appear after cerebral infarction, severely impacting neuronal and brain functioning. Matrix metalloproteinase-9 is able to degrade the major components of the basement membrane around cerebral blood vessels and to mediate extracellular matrix remodeling. Therefore, Dr. Huilian Hou and colleagues from the First Affiliated Hospital of Medical School of Xi'an Jiaotong University, China induced cerebral infarction in stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats by intragastric administration of high-sodium water (1.3% ...

Neuroprotection by ischemic preconditioning has been confirmed by many studies, but the precise mechanism remains unclear. In a study released in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 9, No. 11, 2014), Dr. Yong Liu and co-workers from Tongji Hospital Affiliated to Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China performed cerebral ischemic preconditioning in rats by simulating a transient ischemic attack, and explored the mechanism underlying the neuroprotective effect of ischemic preconditioning. Researchers discovered that the infarct volume ...

Scientists with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station are working to restore New Hampshire and Maine's only native rabbit after new research based on genetic monitoring has found that in the last decade, cottontail populations in northern New England have become more isolated and seen a 50 percent contraction of their range. The endangered New England cottontail is now is at risk of becoming extinct in the region, according to NH Agricultural Experiment Station researchers at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture who believe that restoring ...

Leading experts have joined together for the first time to call for better screening of psoriatic arthritis to help millions of people worldwide suffering from the condition. Psoriatic arthritis (PsA) causes painful joint inflammation and can cause irreversible joint damage if left untreated. PsA tends to affect people with the skin condition psoriasis, which causes a red, scaly rash, and affects approximately two per cent of people in the UK. Around one in five go on to develop PsA – usually within ten years of the initial skin problem being diagnosed. Coming ...

This beautiful star cluster, NGC 3293, is found 8000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel). This cluster was first spotted by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751, during his stay in what is now South Africa, using a tiny telescope with an aperture of just 12 millimetres. It is one of the brightest clusters in the southern sky and can be easily seen with the naked eye on a dark clear night. Star clusters like NGC 3293 contain stars that all formed at the same time, at the same distance from Earth and out of the same cloud ...

Los Angeles, CA (July 23, 2014) Both short and tall men in the military are more at risk for depression than their uniformed colleagues of average height, a new study finds. This study was published today in the open access journal SAGE Open. Despite the researchers' original hypothesis that shorter men in the military would be more psychologically vulnerable than their taller counterparts, researchers Valery Krupnik and Mariya Cherkasova found that men both shorter and taller than average by one standard deviation may be predisposed to higher rates of depressive disorders. ...

CHICAGO --- Controlling pain during childbirth and post delivery may reduce the risk of postpartum depression, writes Katherine Wisner, M.D., a Northwestern Medicine® perinatal psychiatrist, in a July 23 editorial in Anesthesia & Analgesia. Wisner's editorial is based on a new Chinese study that found women who had pain control with epidural anesthesia during a vaginal delivery had a much lower risk for postpartum depression than women who didn't have the epidural. "Maximizing pain control in labor and delivery with your obstetrician and anesthesia team might help ...

With nearly four in five older Americans living with multiple chronic medical conditions, a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that the more ailments you have after retirement age, the shorter your life expectancy. The analysis, one of the first to examine the burden of multiple chronic conditions on life expectancy among the elderly, may help explain why increases in life expectancy among older Americans are slowing. A report on the findings, based on an analysis of 1.4 million Medicare enrollees, appears in the August issue ...

The degree to which consumers perceive themselves to be knowledgeable about a product influences the likelihood that they will buy a particular product, researchers find in a series of studies published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Together, our findings suggest that subjective knowledge may play an important role in determining ideal size for choice sets," explains researcher Liat Hadar of the Arison School of Business at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in Israel. "That is, more options should be provided in ...

Lipid emulsions are crucial for providing essential fatty acids and energy to infants and children who need intravenous feeding. There has been concern that soybean-based emulsions could compromise immune functions and promote liver damage due to its composition. Combination lipid emulsions based on triglyceride oil, fish oil, or olive oil have been developed to address this concern. However, researchers at Rutgers and Tufts universities found that concern may be unwarranted, according to a review published today in the OnlineFirst version of the Journal of Parenteral ...

Heroic worldwide conservation efforts have made great strides in saving China's endangered national treasure, the giant panda. Now, in China, there are over 65 giant panda reserves that have been established and three large breeding centers. But despite these efforts, just 1596 pandas remain in the wild. Breeding programs in conservation centers and zoos hope to save the panda by improving genetic diversity, avoid inbreeding and ultimately, introduce pandas back to the wild. Just how are these high-profile programs doing so far? In a new study appearing in the advanced ...